home-assistant

Life is good if you are a couch potato music enthusiast. Bluetooth audio allows the playing of all your music from your smartphone, and apps to control your hi-fi give you complete control over your listening experience.

Not quite so for [Daniel Landau] though. His Cambridge Audio amplifier isn’t quite the latest generation, and he didn’t possess a handy way to turn it on and off without resorting to its infrared remote control. It has a proprietary interface of some kind, but nothing wireless to which he could talk from his mobile device.

His solution is fairly straightforward, which in itself says something about the technology available to us in the hardware world these days. He took a Raspberry Pi with the Home Assistant home automation package and the LIRC infrared subsystem installed, and had it drive an infrared LED within range of the amplifier’s receiver. Coupled with the Home Assistant app, he was then able to turn the amplifier on and off as desired. It’s a fairly simple use of the software in question, but this is the type of project upon which so much more can later be built.

Ten years ago, we never imagined we would be able to ward off burglars with Pi. However, that is exactly what [Nick] is doing with his Raspberry Pi home security system.

We like how, instead of using a standard siren, [Nick] utilized his existing stereo system to play a custom audio file that he created. (Oh the possibilities!) How many off the shelf alarm systems can you do that with?

The Pi is the brains of the operation, running an open source software program called Home Assistant. If any of the Z-Wave sensors in his house are triggered while the alarm system is armed, the system begins taking several actions. The stereo system is turned on via IR so that the digital alarm audio file can be played. Lights flash on and off. An IP camera takes several snapshots and emails them to [Nick].

Home Assistant didn’t actually have the ability to send images in an email inline at the time that [Nick] was putting together his system. What did [Nick] do about that? He wrote some code to give it that ability, and submitted it through GitHub. That new code was put into a later version of the program. Ah, the beauty of open source software.

Perhaps the most important part of this project is that there were steps taken to help keep the wife-approval factor of the system on the positive side. For example, he configured one of the scripts so that even if the alarm is tripped multiple times in succession, the alarm won’t play over itself repeatedly.